Storytelling Techniques (aka I'm still obsessed w/Yoko Taro)

The title says it all... I'm in love with this man.

My affinity for Yoko Taro, the eccentric, imaginative, and emotional creator of the Nier and Drakengard series, is driven by an appreciation for his outright subversion of happy endings and unhealthy Japanese cliches. I came across an interesting panel from GDC 2014, in which Taro gives us some insight on the method to his madness.

A timeline on the left, with the reasons and peaks laid out on the right.

He begins by explaining the ways in which he can create emotions from events. He starts with an emotional peak, "a girl dies." While this is sad on its own, he notes, the event could have more weight if there were reasons for us to care about this girl.

As the diagram below shows, Taro insists that we stack the reasons in an orderly fashion along the timeline.

He calls this method "Backwards Scriptwriting," and characterizes it by the method of writing the scenes before the forming of the overarching story. in tandem with this method, he utilizes "Photo-thinking," a process where he pictures the visual 'scene' of the emotional peak, and concentrates his thought on things that are exclusively a part of the emotional peak.

By combining these two methods, one can create the foundation for a larger story. He mentions how messy this process can be, as you layer reason after reason and peak after peak.

I think that Taro's method of scripting is brilliant in its uniqueness. In the beginning of the panel, he remissness about the many story/screenwriting books that he read, and how he didn't understand them. At all.

Video games are a difficult industry in terms of writing. They are enormous team efforts with skeletal budgets, and very few have a dedicated "story" person.

Taro's method of scripting is incredibly useful for those who are more visually creative, and less accustomed to intensive, formulaic writing. Because of the difficult medium of video games and their obtuse pacing, a more free-form style of writing is probably beneficial overall.

If you want to make interesting video games, go check out Yoko Taro's panel, "Making Weird Games for Weird People." Not only is it informative; Taro is a serious charmer.